Chicken & Poultry - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: Chicken & Poultry

30
Dec
2019

Coronation Chicken “Brexit” Rolls

categories: 1950's recipes, A Moveable Feast, Brioche, Cantina, Chicken, Leftovers, Tasty Reads

For me, closing out a recipe book is almost as satisfying as marking up the pages of a new one! The very last recipe I had to cook out of A Moveable Feast by Katy Holder was Coronation Chicken Baguettes with Apple Slaw. It took ages to make because leftover roast chicken seems to disappear from my fridge before I ever find the time to mix it with mayo, curry powder and chutney to make up some Coronation Chicken.

I did not have baguettes. I had these gorgeous Bretzel Rolls which are, I assume a cross between a Pretzel roll and a Brioche. These made me laugh because I made them on the day after the British election. Whilst I knew that technically they were Bretzel rolls, in my head, they were only ever Brexit rolls!

For those of you not familiar with the bright orange concoction that is Coronation Chicken, it is the best of British combined with a little bit o’ spice from the days of the Raj. Martin Lampen quite cruelly describes it as follows:

“A combination of chicken breasts, curry powder and mayonnaise, Coronation Chicken was created by flower-decorator and author Constance Spry ( the Nigella Lawson of powdered egg, nylon chaffing, sexual repression, back street abortions and locking women in the attic for thyroid problems and ‘hysterics’) in 1953 to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II….Cheap chicken in a sickly yellow curry gunk with six sultanas. God save the Queen”

It is actually quite delicious – a little bit spicy, a little bit sweet. And the slaw on the side suggested by Katy Holder is a great accompaniment to cut through some of the richness.

You could also make these with turkey if you still have any leftover from Christmas! The homemade is also a whole lot nicer than the “sickly yellow curry gunk” that comes in those plastic tubs in British supermarkets. So why not make your own. With, a Brexit roll if you can get one!

For a vegetarian version, Yotam Ottolenghi suggests his curried egg and cauliflower salad. It lacks the sweetness of a regular Coronation chicken – which could be resolved, if you wish, by adding a little dollop of mango chutney or those sultanas reviled by Martin Lampen.

So this will be my last post for 2019. Apologies for being absent recently. I had a mad 6 weeks at work before the break, then got sick, and since then have been busy trying to socialise the new addition to the family!

Holly joined us about a week ago. She has had a terrible life, first on a puppy farm who then sold her to medical research. So even though she is nearly 11 years old, she has never been a house dog. She is very timid but is learning very quickly how to dog! We already love her to bits. She will need ongoing training but has already come a very long way in a short time. And every second is worth it as she is an absolute joy!

Anyway, all that has meant that the blog has been on a back burner for a while but for 2020…

Now that I have cooked through A Moveable Feast, another aim for 2020 is to cook through Cantina. I did not entirely enjoy this book when we tackled it in Tasty Reads back in 2015. I found the recipes were too long and complicated and many of the ingredients were hard to come. Alhough the results were generally delish. I still have 30 recipes left to cook from it which equates to around 1.5 per week during 2020.

It might be a long year!

The upside is delicious Mexican food 30 times in the year which can’t be a bad thing!!!

Thanks for reading and being a part of this in 2019. Wishing you all a wonderful 2020!!!!

27
Sep
2019

Chicken Curry Mildura – A Sight for Sore Eyes

categories: Australasia, Chicken, Curry

Coming home from vacation is always bittersweet. One of the best parts for me is being able to get back into the kitchen. My head is always buzzing with ideas of how to recreate the food I ate on holiday back at home. But before any of that, there is the first meal at home. This is usually some sort of comfort food. I crave something that is both utterly of home and different to what I’ve been eating. After time in Asia this might be meatballs or shepherd’s pie. This time after a month in Europe, the item I most wanted to cook was something spicy. Chicken Curry Mildura fit the bill perfectly!

Chicken Curry What?

Chicken Curry Mildura. Now the only Mildura I know of is a country town in northwestern Victoria about 6 hours drive from where I live. It is situated on the banks of the Murray River. It is famous for olde worlde paddle steamers and is a centre of fruit growing, particularly citrus and grapes.

The name Mildura is thought to have come from an Aboriginal word meaning either “sore eyes caused by flies” or “red rock”

Let’s go with the red rock shall we? Because it really is a delightful country town! And a beloved vacation place for many Victorians.

After researching it for this post I’m quite keen to go spend the next long weekend up there!

What I could not find at all was why, out of all the Victorian country towns, Mildura alone gets to have an eponymous chicken curry.

Now, the aspiring Sherlocks in the crowd may be thinking “might this curry contain some of the fruit for which Mildura is famous?” No, there is not so much as aa peep from any of those stalwarts of the 1970’s curry – apples, bananas and sultanas. (Thank goodness).

Chicken Curry Mildura does contain one odd, to me anyway, ingredient which is Oyster Sauce. I have never used Oyster Sauce in a curry before! It does not taste at all of oysters or seafood of any kind. I think what it brings to the curry is a lovely deep umami flavour that makes this rather simple curry taste a lot more complex than it is!

My PSA

The recipe, which you can access here calls for 6 birdseye chillies. I need to be careful when I cook because although I love my chilli, The Fussiest Eater in the World who has a white boy palate extraordinaire. However, even I feel that 6 birdseyes is a step too far.

I used two chillies in mine and it was PLENTY hot enough. Add your chillies with discretion so you can enjoy the taste of a very delicious curry!

. Have a great weekend all!

16
Apr
2019

The Ultimate Shawarma….Man!

categories: Chicken & Poultry, Podcasts, Turkey, World Cooking

For my modern take on Turkish food, there was only one choice. It was always going to be shawarma. And my first thought was that I could give some props to my girl Sabrina Ghayour. I own all of her cookbooks and Persiana remains one of my favourite books to cook from. Sabrina’s recipe for ultimate chicken shawarma comes from her book Feasts and it is totally delicious!!!!

But, as I was cooking the shawarma, I reallised I had another connection (that does not involve late night stops at the Hollywood Palace) and that connection is my new favourite podcast, or actually set of pods. I ‘m sure I have spoken about my love of the true crime pod before and some time ago I started listening to Small Town Murder. I virtually inhaled every episode so I was able to catch up on the back catalogue of then 80 something episodes pretty quickly. I’m listening to Episode 114 as I write.

But what do you do when you run out of pod and don’t want to wait a whole week to hear more from the funniest guys in podcasting? Well, in my case, despite barely knowing one sport from another, you start listening to their other pod Crime In Sports. And let me tell you, you don’t have to know anything about sport to enjoy it.

Both of these pods are amazing, the hosts, James Pietrogiallo and Jimmie Whisman are hilarious!!! And the stories!!!! Who knew????

For a good start to the level of crazy Crime in Sports reaches, why not give Episode 58 a try?

#058 – If He Could Kill The World… – The Terribleness Of Viacheslav Datsik

This tale contains neo-Nazi’s, naked snow wrestling, armed robbery, unrestrained testicle pummelling, bare handed escapes from Russian mental asylums and the self-nicknamed Red Tarzan. Believe me, amongst all the, what James and Jimmie would call nudnickery, there is not much time for too much sport.

Another favourite of mine comes from my own country…

#058 – Such is Annihilation – The Chaoticness of Ben Cousins

Aka…you hid your meth where?

What has all this to do with Shawarma you ask? Well, there are some recurring characters in Crime in Sports, a few special guests that pop in for a fleeting moment in each episode and one of those is the Shawarma man. Spawned in Episode 32, (Dave Meggatt), the Shawarma man invariably refuses to serve some hapless and very confused sporting criminal some lovely lamb shawarma. I wonder what he would think about Sabrina’s chicken version!

Just quickly back to Sabrina, her shawarma contains normal pickles. I made some pickled turnips for mine. Normally when you see these they are a gorgeous hot pink. This normally comes from beet juice. I think beets are the food of the devil so I added some radishes to my turnips which turned my pickles a much paler but still rather pretty pink.

That’s me done!

Read and cook Sabrina, listen to Small Town Murder and Crime in Sports and tell me what you think!

Also, please let me know your favourite cookbooks and I’m always up for a good pod recommendation.

For now?

Sign says closed!

15
Oct
2018

Chicken Cacciatore

categories: Chicken, Italy

Happy Chicken Cacciatore Day Everyone!!!!

You might now know it but there is a debate raging on the backstory of Chicken Cacciatore!

Commonly received wisdom will have you believing that Chicken Cacciatore or Hunter’s Chicken originated in Renaissance Italy.

The big problem with this theory is that there were no tomatoes in Renaissance Italy – they only came to Italy post the discovery of the New World!

Ah, but the…let’s call them the Old Worlders will tell you, “It was made without tomatoes back in the day”.

Possible. But tomatoes seem to be fairly integral to the idea of Chicken Cacciatore. Even this old recipe for it which doesn’t contain mushrooms or olives or any of the additions we see in modern Cacciatore contains tomatoes. Two types!

By the way, how adorable is this recipe? The whole book is like this! And where else have you read a recipe that mentions “wretched” little chicken wing or tells you to stir something with enthusiasm!

But, I’ve only told you one side of the debate. The second theory of Chicken Cacciatore comes from Nikki Sengit from her amazing book, The Flavour Thesaurus. Her contention is that Chicken Cacciatore is about as Italian as Chicken Tikka Masala is Indian!

“Hunter’s Stew – which is not, sadly, the invention of pockmarked Sicilian peasants, returning home with a brace of feral chickens slung over their waistcoats, but an English recipe from the 1950’s taught to nice girls by their mothers in the hope they’d bag the sort of chap who’d neither be too unadventurous nor too suspiciously cosmopolitan to object to a lightly herbed slop of chicken in tomato sauce”

Oh Nikki, so harsh!

Chicken Cacciatore is delicious!!! At least this recipe, which is the one I used is! I only took one photo so here it is again!

So, tell me which side of the debate do you land on? Renaissance or 1950’s. Either way, buon appetito and have a great week!!!!

Signature 1

22
Jan
2018

All The Z’s 3 – All The Zucchini – REPOST

categories: Flatbread, Salad, Turkey, Vegetables, Vegetarian, Zucchini

You knew it was coming right? There was never going to be a showcase of Z recipes without a recipe for zucchini. Except there’s not just one zucchini recipe…there’s going to be four. Because it’s midsummer and my zucchini plants have gone berserk. I have been eating zucchini at least once a day for weeks. I have given away dozens of them. And they just keep coming! So I have to keep finding things to do with them. Here is a summary of this summer’s dishes…so far…

This flatbread recipe which is below came via Australian Gourmet Traveller and it is so good – not to mention almost too pretty to eat! If you don’t want to make your own bread, you can sub in a flatbread of your choice. But the bread is pretty easy and gives you a huge dose of smug!

Seriously three zucchini plants are producing enough to feed a small army! And they grow so quickly. One second they are tiny, the next literally as big as my arm!

But here’s the thing…up until recently, I wasn’t that big a fan of zucchini. I recall it from childhood as being a bland soggy mess. My conversion came when I tasted it raw in a salad one day. And it was super good! The above salad is so easy to make and became my go-to whilst on holidays – I chopped a heap of carrots, zucchini, celery and cheese and kept them in a container in the fridge. Whenever I got a bit peckish, I would get out some lettuce, sometimes crumble in some hard-boiled egg, add a splash of dressing and roll up for a healthy, tasty snack! The recipe is from my old fave Rosemary Mayne Wilson’s Salads For All Seasons.

Rosemary suggests a mayo dressing for this salad. I vote no on that. My preferred dressing for this salad is a vinaigrette with a good dollop of mustard in it. Try it…you won’t regret it.

Turkey and Zucchini Patties with Cacio e Pepe Zoodles

Okay, here’s one for the meat eaters! Although I was not very complimentary about a lot of the meals in Pete Evans’ paleo cookbook, Healthy Every Day, these turkey and zucchini patties were an exception. They are awesome! I make them all the time (sometimes I even have to buy zucchini to make them!). I don’t use the egg in this recipe as I find the mixture is already quite wet without it. (Pete also doesn’t tell you to squeeze the water out of the zucchini which you need to do).

And here’s Pete’s recipe:

The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed the fourth dish nestled in below the turkey patties in the photo above. The last recipe in the zucchini extravaganza is a Zoodle Cacio e Pepe. (Zucchini noodles which cheese and pepper). A lot of recipes I have found for this cook the zoodles. We’re not going there. I far prefer raw zucchini to cooked so mine is kind of a Cacio e Pepe carpaccio…

Zoodle Cacio e Pepe

Print Recipe

Ingredients

Scale

1 zucchini
2 tbsp Grana Padano or Parmesan cheese
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp lemon juice
1/2 finely chopped mint (optional)

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

If you have a spiralizer, make noodles out of your zucchini.
If not, use a vegetable peeler to make long thin strips of zucchini.
Place in a bowl and toss through the olive oil, lemon juice, black pepper and cheese.
Top with the mint if using.
Serve straight away

Have a wonderful week! I’m off to harvest more zucchini!

Before we go though, tell me what is your favourite zucchini recipe?

Signature 1